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My hard drive just became obscenely slow

A

apac

Diamond Member
My friend came home from school last night and sometime in transit the drive broke. To test it we plugged it into my machine (a slower, older box with windows XP) and to no suprise the drive didn't show up there either. I later noticed that the drive wasn't spinning at all. For future reference, my HD was the master, his was the slave.

So now we pulled his drive out of my machine and something is wrong with my hard drive. From the moment it starts booting windows XP I can hear the drive being accessed. It should stop at the windows logon screen, and after windows boots up, but it doesn't. The result of this is it literally takes 15 minutes to boot windows, which is then unuseable because it takes 5 minutes for the start menu to even show up after you click it. However when I look at the task manager, the CPU is idle and the ram isn't full, but the HD is still cranking away and the computer is at a crawl.

Is there any logical reason this could happen from adding and then removing a slave hard drive?
 
1) the drive is definitely too old to be RMAed
2) For ease of use I typed it in the first person, but thats actually my friends family computer. I fear for my life if I (somehow) killed it try to salvage my friends.

How could this even happen?
 
that happened to me...once.....

when i put my drive back in, i forgot that the "master" setting was not the
same as when the drive was by itself with no slave present.

its a long shot, but double check the master setting.

good luck
 
XP may have kicked you down to PIO mode to prevent damage due to a dead HDD on cable.

Try booting into safe mode and removing all HDD showing in Dev Man and reboot to redetect and then reset the DMA.
You could also check to see if IDE cable at mobo bacame loosened.
Also, one assumes you didnt unplug/plug data cable or 12V molex while computer on.
 
Well, I finally figured it out. Noticed that when it booted to the XP user logon screen, it stopped for a few seconds and then loaded something and everything became rediculously slowed down. Booted into safe mode, looked at everything for a while and then noticed the RAM was detected at 32mb (had been using the HD as swapspace). Just swapped the RAM into another slot on the motherboard and it worked like a charm.

I'm still clueless as to how this related to the additional HD, but it might have been coincidence. Quite happy it's fixed though because his mother would have been more than happy to blame it on our shenanigans 🙂.
 
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